How to Create Your Personal Brand Tagline

What’s your tagline?

Once you have an understanding of who you are, how you add value, and how the world sees you, it’s time to put it all into perspective.

Depending on how much feedback you may have received at this point, consolidating all of this great information may seem like a daunting task. That task becomes even more epic if you select only two to three words to describe yourself.

This is one of the goals that the Fascination Advantage assessment gives you; build a tagline for your personality that is a very short phrase, only two to three words. This short phrase will become your anthem.

A quick google search of the word anthem reveals that an Anthem is:

“A rousing or uplifting song identified with a particular group, body, or cause.”

Before you ask, no you’ll not be singing your anthem. Although I guess you could if you wanted to.

You will look to build a phrase that captures all that you’ve learned through the personal branding process.

It’s not easy. You wont get it right the first time. It’s an iterative process, but you have to just start.

Why build a tagline for your personal brand?

Does a personal tagline seem silly to you? At first, it seemed silly to me. Then I took a step back. I asked myself when in the last year I would have used a tagline to describe myself or what I’m all about.

The answers flooded in, but here are two that may resonate with you.

During introductions at conferences

Anytime I was asked to “Tell me about yourself”

Having a concise phrase, snapshot or anthem to describe yourself to other people is a big confidence booster.

Think about the last time you were asked about yourself. How did you answer? Did you fumble over your words? Did you use your job title in your introduction? Whatever approach you used, I’m guessing you fizzled out quickly.

Having a tagline will provide you with a conversation starter, and if done correctly, a tagline can instill a lot of confidence in your answer that will be “felt” by the people who hear it.

Trust me, when you have a concise answer to the question “Who are you and what do you do,” you will become as Sally Hogshead and her team put it, “More fascinating.”

Get Started by Listing Phrases

If you’ve been following this series since the beginning, this is where you’ll need to pull together all of the information you’ve gained about yourself. If you’ve used the worksheets I provided HERE, this process will be very easy.

Think of this process as a big funnel. Our goal is to start with as much as we can and filter it all down into a concise two to three-word phrase that describes you.

We are going to start by listing out all of the phrases, from your assessment and your trusted advisors, that really resonated with you.

Here is my list of phrases.

“You are innovative, inventive, original, and resourceful”

“You entertain ideas about the best ways to reach a goal, increase productivity, or solve a problem”

“Your revolutionary thinking is coupled with a strong confidence and focus on attaining goals. You don’t propose new designs only because you enjoy new things, you’re also keen to use your fresh ideas to help achieve the company’s goals”

“You quickly solve problems with fresh solutions”

“You are curious, unconventional, and seek new options”

“You are a practical, concrete thinker. You think in terms of “steps” and “modules.”

“You are a problem solver. You are not fazed by complex situations, because, when faced with a challenge, you break it down into its component parts”

“You are at your most powerful and charismatic when breaking a process or situation down so that other people can see what is really going on”

“You break things down into their component elements and this enables you to reconfigure them in new and different ways”

“You’re a creative problem solver”

“Your strength is your ability to think things through”

Combine Like / Similar Phrases

Now that you have a list of phrases that best describe you, read through the phrases and look for commonalities. Where you see similar phrases, combine them into one.

The goal is to narrow down the phrases into something more manageable. Here is my list of like phrases combined. Notice I went from 20 to 10.

“You entertain ideas and share your perspective on the best ways to reach a goal, increase productivity, or solve a problem”

“Your mind churns out new and inventive ways of reaching your goals”

“You set aside time to ponder your goals and consider why certain mechanisms, processes, programs, or rules failed in the past”

“You’re able to think in both linear and nonlinear ways. Free association allows you to come up with fresh and novel ways to do things while your logical mind helps you implement them”

“Your revolutionary thinking is always ready to challenge the familiar path coupled with a strong confidence and focus you seek to discover new ways to attain and achieve goals.”

“You are curious, unconventional, seek new options and you think things through and are able to reconfigure options and ideas in new and different ways”

“You quickly solve problems with fresh, creative solutions. You are not fazed by complex situations, because, when faced with a challenge, you break processes down into their component parts; you think in terms of ‘steps’ and ‘modules.'”

Affinitize Your Phrases into Logical Categories

After combining all of the similar phrases that describe you, group the remaining phrases into logical categories. In my case, the phrases can be grouped into 3 broad categories: problem-solving, innovative ideas, achieving goals.

Problem Solving

“You quickly solve problems with fresh, creative solutions. You are not fazed by complex situations, because, when faced with a challenge, you break processes down into their component parts. You think in terms of ‘steps’ and ‘modules.'”

“You set aside time to ponder your goals and consider why certain mechanisms, processes, programs, or rules failed in the past”

“Your revolutionary thinking is always ready to challenge the familiar path coupled with a strong confidence and focus you seek to discover new ways to attain and achieve goals”

Narrow Each Category

You probably saw this one coming, but narrow each category down into a single paragraph of no more than three sentences.

Problem Solving

“You are not fazed by complex situations, because, when faced with a challenge, you break processes down into their component parts; you think in terms of ‘step’ and ‘modules.’ During this process, you consider why certain mechanisms, processes, programs, or rules failed in the past. You entertain ideas and share your perspective on the best ways to reach a goal, solve problems with fresh, creative solutions to help you quickly solve problems or increase productivity.”

Innovative Ideas

“You are a little restless, curious, unconventional, and always seeking new options. You’re able to think in both linear and nonlinear ways. This free association allows you to come up with fresh and novel ways to do things while your logical mind helps you think through implementation so you can reconfigure options and ideas in new and different ways.”

Achieving Goals

“To keep on track to reach your goals, you set aside time to ponder your goals and consider why certain mechanisms, processes, programs, or rules failed in the past. Because you are creative, innovative, sharp-witted, inventive, original, and resourceful, you are always ready to challenge the familiar path as you seek to discover new and inventive ways to attain and achieve goals”

Continue

Take your three sentences and narrow each one down to a concise sentence. Rewrite the sentence if need be, just don’t lose the “essence” of the three categories in the process.

Problem Solving

“While breaking processes down into their component parts, you entertain new and fresh ideas in order to develop creative solutions to complex problems or increase productivity”

Innovative Ideas

“You logically think ideas through to implementation which allows you to seek unconventional options that can be reconfigured into new and different solutions”

Achieving Goals

“You seek to understand the past in order to challenge the familiar path to help you discover original and inventive ways to attain and achieve goals”

Your Tagline

If you thought it was hard getting to this point, you’re right, it was. However, now it gets harder. Start by developing a single sentence that encompasses all three sentences.

Here’s mine:

“In order to achieve your goals, you often challenge the familiar path by breaking processes into component parts and examining each in order to understand the past which helps you develop original and creative solutions to complex problems.”

Now replace the word You with I, me or my.

“In order to achieve my goals, I often challenge the familiar path by breaking processes into component parts and examining each individually in order to understand the past which helps me develop original and creative solutions to complex problems”

Think about your tagline for a minute. Does it accurately describe you? Can you say it with confidence? Can you give examples of times when you’ve put your tagline to work?

If you’ve answered yes, congratulations! You’ve just created a tagline for yourself; a short sentence that you can use to tell others about yourself.

Looking for another challenge? Can you get your tagline down to 3 words?

Refine Your Tagline

You may remember from my review of the Fascination Advantage assessment, there is a section on building your personal anthem. The purpose of the anthem is to find the perfect words to describe yourself.

The anthem is short, using no more than three words, and should reflect your tagline.

Each of the 7 Fascination Advantage’s come with three words that describe your advantages. Taking into account both your primary and secondary advantages, that means you get 6 words to describe you. Here are my 6 words.

I struggled with this one for a long time. Narrowing down my tagline into three words seemed impossible. As my personality type indicates, I took a lot of time to think about it. I also took an unconventional approach.

To start, I took all of my phrases listed above and put them into word cloud generator, wordle, which generated this picture.

A few things stood out to me from this exercise. First, the word “goals.” It’s one of the biggest words, which means it was in my phrases a lot. It also happens to align with one of my 6 words for my personality advantages.

Goal-Oriented

Two words down. One to go to. Other words stood out to me in the word cloud as well: new ways, ideas, problem solver, innovative, creative, fresh and inventive. All of those can be boiled down to these three words: creative problem solver.

While I like creative problem solver, it also seems tired and used to me. It’s not new or fresh. It wouldn’t help me stand out, be remembered, or be fascinating to others.

So I kept searching until I came across this video of 13-year-old Logan LaPlante. The video, by the way, is excellent and I recommend you watch the entire video; however, to find my light bulb moment fast forward to the 4:55-minute mark.

Did you catch it? A Hacker. But not the computer kind that geeks out on code. Instead this kind of Hacker:

Innovators who challenge and change the systems to make them work differently, to make them work better.

Holy cow. Re-read my single sentence. A hacker, when defined in this manner, completely fits with that sentence. In fact, it fits with everything I’ve done to this point in my career.

I do challenge the systems and processes in companies that have become the norm, the Status Quo. In the process of challenging the systems, I develop fresh and creative ideas that solve problems and ultimately change a system so it works better.

I’ve done this in every job I’ve ever had. I am a Hacker. But not the computer one as I stated before. Instead, I am a: